Toucans are a beautiful specie of bird but they are also much easier to break down into parts for little ones to draw than they might look! Of course another advantage is the fact that they have such a distinctively huge bill that they are easily recognizable even in a kinder drawing :)

My little doodlebugs and I got to learn a bit more about this gorgeous bird and they I directed them on the steps to getting his likeness on paper.

They traced their birds in sharpies and painted them in using tempera paints.

A parrot is a beautiful bird and when the Picassos saw that they were going to paint one they were all convinced that it was just too hard... but after some instruction on how we break any subject down into smaller parts and focus on one small piece at a time they were all able to draw birds that could be instantly recognized as parrots!

Needless to say they were pretty darn proud and took great joy adding the details and painting them to perfection! Take a look :)

It is always satisfying to see my tiny artists look at a picture and say "we are going to paint that!!!" "that looks so hard!!!" and then when we break the picture down into shapes and smaller parts they realize they can do it after all!

This simple little composition was very cool for my Doodlebugs and again we broke it down into parts and they drew a simplified version of the subject (in this case a giraffe) by making him from the letter h!

Take a look at our positively cute piece... The Giraffe and the Orange Tree!And of course... because this is Arty Pants Studio I took the opportunity to show some fun facts about giraffes as well so we leave knowing just a little bit more than we did!

This piece took two classes to complete because the drawing was so detailed, and whilte they all enjoyed learning about the parts of the castle and drawing the intricate details, boy were they thrilled to start painting! Be sure to check out the drawing process in Part 1 of this project as well if you missed it!

The Doodlebugs got to make the Pierrot Grenade today :) This was a fun project and they really got into cutting up the paper into strips and of course it goes without saying that any time they get to use glue is a good day!

We chatted about the traditional carnival characters and talked about the Pierrot Grenade and they looked at a few pictures for inspiration.

Once they were familiar with what we were about to do we got right down to it and this is how they turned out!

It's Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago so I wanted to bring some of our traditional mas characters into the art room today. There is such a wide variety to choose from but I settled on the colourful and bombastic Pierrot Grenade as much for the glorious use of colour as for this character's notorious oratory skill!

So we talked a little about the characters they were familiar with and then watched this video of a Pierrot Grenade in action :)

I also wanted them to see some images of artwork created by local artist Rebecca Foster. She has rendered the Pierrot Grenade masterfully and this is what we used as inspiration for our work today!